Review also published in Herald Sun Arts online on Monday Feb 27, 2016 & later in print. KH

L-R Nick Simpson-Deeks, George Kemp, Luke Joslin, James Marlowe

(Couch) Darcy Browne, Brooke Satchwell

An old
theatre adage advises actors to ‘remember your lines and don’t fall over the
furniture’, but it forgets to warn that the furniture might fall on you.

In this raucously
slapstick, UK comedy, The Play That Goes Wrong, anything that can go wrong does
go wrong (Murphy’s Law), including a collapsing set, missed cues, forgotten
lines, missing props and truly awful, hammy acting.

In the play-within-the-play, the pitifully
under-staffed and painfully untalented amateur theatre company, Cornley Polytechnic
Drama Society, stages The
Murder at Haversham Manor, a 1920s murder mystery in the style
of The Mousetrap, the madly
successful, long-running West End play by Agatha Christie.

The play-outside-the-play
is often achingly funny, chaotic and silly and Mark Bell’s direction draws on
the essential dynamics of physical comedy that hark back to Charlie Chaplin and
Buster Keaton and the techniques of the Le Coq clown school in Paris.

The story
is incidental to the sheer idiocy and chaos of the incompetent, am-dram actors,
but suffice to say that there’s a dead body in the drawing room, a bunch of
upper-class twits, their servants and a police inspector (Nick Simpson-Deeks), who
take two hours to figure out who did or didn’t kill the murder victim.

The star
of the production is Nigel Hook’s set design that seems possessed of an evil
theatre spirit that gives the set a demonic life of its own even before the
play-within-the-play begins.

Simpson-Deeks
captures the escalating desperation of Chris Bean, the ambitious but beleaguered
director / producer (and everything else) of the murder mystery who struggles
to keep his production on track while he is also on stage playing the pernickety
Inspector Carter.

The
‘actors’ stand and deliver their rote-learned lines directly to the audience,
rarely looking at each other or communicating, and relentlessly persevering despite
a list of disasters that includes cast members being knocked unconscious –
repeatedly.

Luke
Joslin is suitably pompous as Robert, the actor who, in turn, plays the
snobbish Thomas Collymore, and Joslin’s comic business as he attempts to answer
a phone while sliding down a collapsing platform is a show highlight.

James
Marlow is a riot as the applause-seeking Max who plays Cecil Haversham with
histrionic mincing, prancing, outrageous over-acting and pandering to the
audience.

One wild scene is the
mounting violence of the slapstick fight between Annie, the self-effacing Stage
Manager (Tammy Weller), and the egotistical Sandra (Brooke Satchwell), who
plays Florence Collymore with absurdly flamboyant, balletic gestures.

Adam Dunn provides plenty of laughs as Trevor,
the incompetent technician who can’t get a lighting or sound cue right and is
more interested in texting his pals or finding out who nicked his Duran Duran
CDs.

Darcy
Brown provides plenty of sight gags as the putative dead body that must take up
his bed and walk off stage, while George Kemp is nerdy and supremely stupid as Dennis
who plays Perkins, the butler.

The Play
That Goes Wrong is the latest in the line of British farces about am-dram that
includes The Real Inspector Hound (Tom Stoppard) and Noises Off (Michael
Frayn).

The broad
farce and physical comedy of this show may leave you with a sore jaw from
laughing out loud – unless your tastes in comedy are more cerebral and subtle.

Oh, and
this reviewer strongly denies accepting – or, at least, spending – the $5
‘bribe’ that the ‘director’ unobtrusively slipped into her hand before the
show. No, really! It had ‘BRIBE’ scrawled on it in texta, anyway!

Friday, 17 February 2017

Review also published in Herald Sun online on Friday Feb 17, 2017, and later in print. KH

Helen Morse & Johnny Carr

In her play, John, award-winning American playwright,
Annie Baker, braids the ordinary with the peculiar and the real with the otherworldly,
evoking a slightly disturbing sense of dislocation and miscommunication.

In the historic town of Gettysburg, site
of a horrific American Civil War massacre, troubled couple, Elias (Johnny Carr) and Jenny
(Ursula Mills), arrive at a Bed and Breakfast run by the
relentlessly cheerful but ever so slightly odd Mertis (Helen Morse),
who prefers to be called Kitty.

Attentive hostess, Mertis, like one of
her beloved birds, flutters around her guests in her kitsch B and B that is
cluttered with bric-a-brac, decorated with old-fashioned, floral carpets (Design,
Elizabeth Gadsby), and
a pianola that has a life of its own.

Her big-city guests and their petty
bickering seem banal in comparison with Mertis and her even more eccentric,
much older friend, Genevieve (Melita Jurisic), who is blind and intermittently suffers delusions and
audio-hallucinations.

‘Have you ever
had the feeling that someone is watching you?’ asks Mertis; not only do we recognise
the sensation of being watched over by a higher being, we are also intensely aware
that we, the audience, are voyeurs on this tiny, intimate and strangely
ordinary world.

The
concept of vision is key in this story, with one character blind, one myopic,
one a little bit psychic, and the fourth fascinated by spectacles and, adding
to this notion, is the playfulness of light (Richard Vabre), both natural and
artificial.

Perhaps even
more significant are the lies, secrets, unspoken thoughts and mysterious pasts
of all four characters that reveal themselves in spurts and trickles as the
four struggle through several days and nights.

The
entire cast is accomplished with the luminous Helen Morse central, playing
Mertis with nuance and sensitivity, giving her a whimsical, vibrating quality
that seems to mask a darker secret.

Jurisic
gives an audacious and often hilarious performance as the acerbic but
definitely bonkers Genevieve, whose delusions elicit laughs but whose mental
illness is far from funny.

Carr
effectively captures both Elias’s vulnerability and his volatility as he
wrestles with his own insecurity about his fractious and unravelling
relationship with Jenny.

Mills is
sympathetic as Jenny, balancing her barely masked despair and overt neediness
with secretive behaviour, but leaving us with the sense that Jenny is eminently
faithless and untrustworthy.

Sarah
Goodes’ unobtrusive direction focuses on character and relationship, and on the
spaces between the words that are a signature element of Baker’s writing.

Although
the play has a weird, spooky quality, it seems to occur in
real time with characters frequently pausing, musing, considering or gazing
during long silences.

This realistic ordinariness is more
successful than the hints of the supernatural that seem tacked on and do not quite
gel.

So who is
John? By the end of this three-hour production with two intervals, all will be
revealed and you may leave with an uneasy sense that you missed something that
occurred off-stage or upstairs in this peculiar little B and B.

Wednesday, 15 February 2017

Review also published in Herald Sun online on Wed Feb 15, 2017, and later in print. KH

Alice Qin & Diana [Xiaojie] Lin

The actors
in Lachlan Philpott’s Little Emperors perform ankle-deep in a murky pool of
water that heightens the physical and personal struggles of their characters.

Wading
through this emotional soup, the four Chinese and Australian characters shift
through myriad moods as they splash each other playfully, stumble or drag
themselves with laboured movements through the resistant water, or fall face
first into the shallow pool like drowned souls.

Little
Emperors, a play that deals with the repercussions of China’s One Child Policy
that ended in 2016, is the result of a Malthouse Theatre collaboration between
Philpott and Wang Chong, a young director from Beijing.

Philpott’s script, set in
Melbourne and Beijing and performed in English and Mandarin by Chinese and
Australian actors, explores the personal experiences, memories and stories of
some of those affected by China’s social experiment that aimed to control
population.

In
Beijing, Huishan (Alice Qin), a single, 31-year old woman, wrestles with her
fraught relationship with her fragile but demanding and emotionally
manipulative mother (Diana [Xiaojie] Lin).

Meanwhile,
across the world in Melbourne, Huishan’s ‘illegal’ brother, Kaiwen (Yuchen
Wang), struggles to direct and devise an experimental play for the ChuFest, a
Chinese university theatre festival; a play-within-a-play that echoes the theme
of the One Child Policy.

Yuchen
Wang (R) Alice Qin (on screen)

On both
sides of the world chaos ensues as characters reveal dark secrets, unleash personal
attacks, challenge each other’s world views and face the repressed emotions
arising from the consequences of the One Child Policy.

Diana Lin
is compelling as the Mandarin-speaking mother, creating a poignant and complex
character who agonises over her unmarried daughter’s circumstances, avoids her
own serious illness and pines for her absent son, Kaiwen.

Lin
brings a depth and range of feeling to the mother’s wrenching stories about her
childhood during the Cultural Revolution, her husband’s iron-fisted control, and
her grief over her past, enforced separation from her ‘illegal’, second child.

The
scenes performed in Mandarin by Lin with Qin as her daughter, are the strongest
as the two grapple with their love that is tainted by miscommunication, the opposing
aspirations of two generations of Chinese women, and a mother’s desire to live vicariously
through her daughter.

The English
language scenes are less successful when Kaiwen, known as Kevin in Melbourne, tries
to direct his muddled play but is left with only the sound technician (Liam
Maguire) when all the actors abandon the project and Kevin reveals his
arrogance.

The dialogue
and action between Yuchen Wang and Maguire is awkward, laboured and not
credible, particularly in their seduction scene, but Yuchen Wang’s final scene
in Mandarin is his most believable and moving when Kevin/Kaiwen finally lets
down his guard and reveals his anguish.

Wang
Chong’s direction uses a non-naturalistic style that is a counterpoint to the
generally naturalistic dialogue, and he heightens the abstraction with live
video of the mother and daughter projected on a huge, curtain of Chinese newsprint
suspended behind the pool (design by Romanie Harper).

Despite
the unevenness in the performances, Little Emperors provides us with some intimate
insights into the repercussions of the Chinese One Child experiment.

Monday, 6 February 2017

Review also published in Herald Sun Arts online on Mon Feb 6, 2017 and later in print. KH

Joe Petruzzi, Peter
Houghton

We hope
against hope that our governments and corporations stay honest, but all those blokes
we see on the TV news marching into corruption enquiries chip away at our faith
in ethical practices.

Power
corrupts, goes the saying, and in Aidan
Fennessy’s play, The Way Things Work, Minister Barlow (Joe Petruzzi) is the
epitome of a dodgy, state politician as he tries to wriggle out of a corruption
scandal by schmoozing then blackmailing a senior public servant, Dench (Peter
Houghton).

Fennessy’s
biting satire peers into the machinations of the political, corporate and
criminal worlds at the point where they intersect over the building of the
fictional Western Link Tunnel that is now the subject of a Royal Commission.

Houghton
and Petruzzi are versatile and credible in their multiple roles as they deliver
Fennessy’s acerbic dialogue with comic assurance.

The two-hander divides into three acts, the first
observing the off-the-record meeting between Barlow and Dench, while the second
portrays a volatile confrontation between the two Greek-Australian brothers (Petruzzi,
Houghton) who own the company that supplied concrete for the tunnel.

The final
scene, between a prison guard (Petruzzi)
and
a violent criminal (Houghton), is the most
physically intimidating and makes the space dangerous while it reveals the
extent of the corrupt practices of the previous characters.

Petruzzi
embodies the smarmy but rough-edged politician, Barlow, who fights like a
mongrel dog to save his corrupt career from disgrace, while Houghton’s Dench
shifts from a reasonable, ethical man to one who is cowardly and pliable.

Joe Petruzzi, Peter
Houghton

The
initially broad, comic caricatures of the concrete–selling brothers take a
nasty turn as Houghton’s character reveals his strategy to undermine his
brother’s plans for a ‘golden handshake’– with the blessing of their mother.

Houghton’s
formidable acting range is evident in the third scene when he transforms into
the sneering, manipulative inmate who seems vulnerable and needy until he
reveals his secret control over his gaoler, Warren, played with easy blokiness
by Petruzzi.

Fennessy,
who both wrote and directed the play, maintains a simmering dangerous energy in
all scenes while commenting satirically on the unethical and criminally corrupt
practices that sometimes permeate our governments and corporations.

The Way
Things Work is an indictment of these practices and it reminds us how powerless
we are to interrupt the flow of corruption and how little we know about what
goes on behind closed doors.

Gird your
loins and smash your moral compass before entering the theatre for The Book of
Mormon.

This
irreverent, over-the-top, satirical production is a riot of memorable songs,
absurd narrative, stoopid dancing and idiotic, religious iconography that
recalls sappy prayer book pictures of Jesus and God.

Even while you
shriek with laughter, you’ll cringe with shame that you are guffawing at such
rampantly offensive, blasphemous, racist and scurrilous material by Trey Parker
and Matt Stone, those wildly successful, bad boys of TV (South Park), film
(Team America) and now musicals, with their new playground pal, Robert Lopez
(Avenue Q, Frozen).

It slams The
Mormons – AKA the Church of The Latter Day Saints – in this tale of two boyish
and naive Mormon missionaries, Elder Price (Ryan Bondy) and Elder Cunningham (A.J.
Holmes), whose two-year mission sends them to Uganda to convert Africans to
their Church and convince them of the Mormons’ seemingly mad, almost Sci-Fi
beliefs.

The show may
break all standards of taste and political correctness, but it adheres religiously
(ironic, eh?) to the conventions of the Broadway musical with its repertoire of
singable tunes, tight choreography and fish-out-of-water characters who go on a
journey into the unknown to learn about themselves and the world.

The dialogue
and lyrics (Parker, Lopez, Stone) are riddled with expletives, foul-mouthed
rants and grotesque references that include raping babies to cure AIDS and
routine clitorectomies on village women.

Directors,
Casey Nicholaw and Parker, keep up a frenetic pace of outrageously silly
choreography (Nicholaw) and high-octane, comic delivery to leave the audience
gasping for air as they gape open-mouthed at the sheer brutality and lunacy of
it all.

Bondy captures
the ambition, sense of entitlement and super egotism of Elder Price but still
manages to make him likeable as he demeans his missionary companion, patronises
the Ugandans and confronts his rising doubts. He questions his faith, the
Heavenly Father and the loony story about Joseph Smith digging up the Book of
Mormon that becomes the third book of the Christian Bible. Yeah, really!

Holmes is
versatile as Elder Cunningham, the giggling Star Wars freak, investing him with
childlike energy as Cunningham lets loose his wild imagination – known as lying
in the Mormon church – to create new myths to address the myriad problems faced
by the villagers. He digs deep to sing Man Up then converts the village when he
sings Making Thing Up Again.

Bert LaBonté has a field day as village head, Mafala Hatimbi, leading
the chorus in the effervescent and irreligious Hasa Diga Ebowai.

Zahra Newman who
has a fine voice singing the sweet Sal Tlay Ka Siti, plays Mafala’s daughter,
Nabulungi, whose name Cunningham cannot, for the life of him, get right. (He
calls her Neutrogena, Nutribullet and even Nutella). Newman merges charming,
bright-eyed naiveté with poignant
moments of hopelessness when she feels betrayed by Cunningham’s ‘lies’.

The ensemble
includes an immaculately groomed chorus of Mormon clones, dressed in pristine
white shirts and pressed trousers, and beaming with glittering, white smiles
and their annoyingly relentless positivity. Their chorus of Turn It Off reveals
hilariously how they repress and switch off every little, provocative or
unhealthy thought.

It may,
however, make some audience members consider how the arrogant West (read
America) slaps bandaids on horrendous, Third World problems. The Mormons may be
repressed, chauvinistic and puritanical, but they are also hopeful and well meaning
and they have a go at helping others, even if they go about it in a weird way.

Friday, 3 February 2017

Review also online at Herald Sun on Feb 2, 2017 and later in print. KH

Richard Katz in The Encounter, pics by Joan Marcus

Do not
adjust your headphones because Richard Katz in The Encounter is about to transport
you to the jungles of the Brazilian Amazon in this startling and immersive
feast of sound and story.

Katz may
be alone on stage surrounded by microphones, reams of videotape and other
detritus of the modern world, but he populates the space with characters through
his versatile voice, evocative storytelling and the maddeningly complex aural
landscape that he and the sound technicians create to hurl us into the
rainforest.

The show is based on Petru Popescu’s book, Amazon Beaming, that explores the experiences
of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre who, when stranded in the
remote Amazonian jungle in 1969, encountered the isolated Mayoruna tribe of ‘cat
people’.

All audience members wear high-tech headphones that
transmit Katz’s voice and a remarkable array of sound effects directly to our
ears, an experience that feels extremely intimate because Katz seems to be
whispering immediately beside us.

The experience is initially alarmingly disorienting as
Katz’s voice and the soundscape shifts from our left ear to our right or seems
to move around us, behind us, shifting closer or further away as if we are
hearing and experiencing the real world.

This weird and compelling effect is the result of Katz
speaking near the mysterious, ‘binaural’ head that is some inconceivable form
of 3-D microphone that looks like a ghostly sentinel perched on top of a totem pole.

The
charming and gleeful Katz transports us to the Amazon, addressing us directly
as himself and as and McIntyre, the deep-voiced American, but he also conjures
a parade of other people including Barnacle, the wart-covered tribal chief, Red
Cheeks, the rebellious tribesman and Tootie, a playful boy.

As the
cacophonous sounds of the rainforest and its creatures and people pump into our
ears, we slap away a mosquito, turn to check no one is standing at our shoulder
or walking towards us over crumpled leaves, or that we are not dangerously
close to a surging river.

The
Encounter is a strangely hallucinatory experience and, as we trek through the
jungle with McIntyre and the tribe, we question our perceptions of reality and what is fact or fiction, what is real or
manufactured, while we
muse with McIntyre about solitude, the
march of time and the nature of civilisation.

Using
ancient rituals and hallucinogens, Barnacle wants to take his tribe back to ‘the beginning’, defying time, returning to
a period and place where white man and his planes, weapons and sickness cannot
reach them.

We ponder
the nature of communication as McIntyre struggles to understand how Barnacle
beams messages directly to him without speech, and we confront our own
materialism as McIntyre deals with
losing all material goods, including his precious camera and the film that
holds the images that make the experience ‘real’ for him.

The
Encounter by Complicite is a challenging and mesmerising performance that
creates a world in our minds and reminds us of the extraordinary skill of the
actor and the magic that is great theatre.